The making of the Maybot: a year of mindless slogans, U-turns and denials | Politics | The GuardianAfter going to visit the Queen, the Maybot made her way slowly towards the wooden lectern set up outside the front door of No 10. Her wheels often found it difficult to cope with uneven surfaces. A helicopter hovering overhead made it difficult to pick out the Supreme Leader’s words. No matter. She didn’t really have anything of interest to say. “I will now form a government,” the Maybot murmured in a catatonic monotone. “A government that can provide certainty and lead Britain forward at this critical time for our country.” Government. Certainty. Forward. Not the three words that were on anyone else’s tongue. It was as if she had been awoken from a seven-week cryogenic state and had decided to mix things up just for the hell of it.

How Booking.com manipulates youMany websites and applications these days are designed to trick you into doing things that their creators want. YouTube autoplays more videos to keep us from leaving. Instagram shows new likes one at a time, to keep us checking for more. Facebook wants to show whatever keeps us scrolling. Snapchat turns conversations into streaks we don’t want to lose. Our media turns events into breaking news to keep us watching. But one of the most manipulative websites I’ve ever come across is Booking.com, the large hotel search & booking service.

Belgium criticised for inviting Sudanese ‘secret agents’ to Brussels to identify migrants“It’s revolting to see Theo Francken work with the Sudanese government to send refugees back to that oppressive country,” Human Rights Watch’s Andrew Stroehlein told The Telegraph. “Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been a fugitive from the International Criminal Court since 2009, wanted on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. This is Belgium’s new partner?”

Donald Trump Betrays Everyone. Somehow, Republicans Still Seem Surprised.Betrayal isn’t just a part of Trump’s behavior; it’s wired into his DNA. Donald Trump will always lie. Always. He will lie and betray when he thinks it makes him look good. He will lie and betray when he knows it will make him look bad. His default setting is to lie and betray, and if this week hasn’t finally taught Republicans and conservatives that lesson, it’s hard to see what will.

Fuck You Startup World – MediumFuck your startup scene with your 30 minute morning routines of reading TechCrunch, TNW, Wired, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge and ProductHunt- all so you dwont feel ‘left out’. Fuck your weird fucking conversations, things like “OMG did you see Snapchat’s new feature? OMG Instagram is totally copying Snapchat? Did you see Zuck’s live townhall? OMG did you see what Elon Musk tweeted? OMG Uber raised another round!”. Fuck that. Nobody cares.

And what the fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.

Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading – Data Lab – MediumAway from the publicity glare of the Valley tech blogs, every web company should have some not-so-bullshit metrics that guide the business and provide an indication of its health. Ideally, there is one number to rule them all. Josh Elman calls this The Only Metric That Matters. At Medium, our number is Total Time Reading, or TTR.

Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance | Freedom House"What is being taught today in Saudi public school textbooks about how Muslims should relate to other religious communities will poison the minds of a new generation of Saudis," said Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom and principal author of the report. "Whatever changes have been made in the Saudi educational system, clearly more needs to be done."

Tufte CSSTufte CSS provides tools to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its simplicity, extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and carefully chosen typography. Tufte CSS was created by Dave Liepmann and is now an Edward Tufte project.

How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad NameToday’s Apple has eliminated the emphasis on making products understandable and usable, and instead has imposed a Bauhaus minimalist design ethic on its products. Unfortunately, visually simple appearance does not result in ease of use, as the vast literature in academic journals on human-computer interaction and human factors demonstrates.

Doing Something About the ‘Impossible Problem’ of Abuse in Online Games | Re/codeAs a result of these governance systems changing online cultural norms, incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism in League of Legends have fallen to a combined 2 percent of all games. Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40 percent, and 91.6 percent of negative players change their act and never commit another offense after just one reported penalty.

Butterick’s Practical TypographyAmong web-pub­lish­ing tools, I see Medium as the equiv­a­lent of a frozen pizza: not as whole­some as a meal you could make your­self, but for those with­out the time or mo­ti­va­tion to cook, a po­ten­tially bet­ter op­tion than just eat­ing peanut but­ter straight from the jar. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that Medium holds out its ho­mo­ge­neous de­sign as more than a frozen pizza. It has be­come, by the Jedi mind trick­ery fa­vored by to­day’s tech com­pa­nies, a Bel­la­gio buf­fet of de­li­cious nonsense.

What ISIS Really Wants – The AtlanticThe Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To YouThis article points out cases where gettext (a common system for localizing software interfaces — i.e., making them work in the user's language of choice) fails because of basic differences between human languages. This article then describes Maketext, a new system capable of correctly treating these differences.

The 7 Habits of Highly Efficient Adobe Illustrator Users – Tuts+ Design & Illustration TutorialIt might initially take some time to change your settings, learn keyboard shortcuts and create actions. And there are times when you'd rather do something the old familiar way, even if it takes longer. But if you take some time up front to make your workflow more efficient, it will pay off in the long run. You'll soon see that getting rid of daily annoyances will free up your creativity and leave you with a more pleasurable Illustrator experience.

The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game DeveloperWhen I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true. I always wondered what it would look like when it stopped being true, when the need for developers dwindled, and programming stopped paying the bills. Now I know.

Putting Time In Perspective – UPDATED | Wait But WhyTo try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which). All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re expressing.

Transgender People Can Explain Why Women Don’t Advance at Work | The New RepublicBecause trans people are now staying in the same careers (and sometimes the very same jobs) after they change genders, they are uniquely qualified to discuss the difference between how men and women experience the workplace. Their experience is as close to the scientific method as we can get: By isolating and manipulating gender as a variable and holding all other variables—skill, career, personality, talent—constant, these individuals reveal exactly the way one’s outward appearance of gender affects day-to-day interactions. If we truly want to understand women at work, we should listen carefully to trans men and trans women: They can tell us more about gender in the workplace than just about anyone.

Lost Garden: Top 5 design debates I ignored in 2014Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when conversation about game design was first bubbling up out of our community of insecure practitioners, a few polarizing topics would arise again and again. You’ll recognize them: The correct definition of ‘game’ – Narrative vs Mechanics – Randomness vs Skill – The importance of realism – Casual vs Hardcore

García Media → Here are six predictions for the new yearThe year 2014 is going to be making an exit (stage left) soon, and we can already see 2015 peeking its baby head from behind the curtains. It was a year of challenges and opportunities. The new year amplifies on some of the advances of 2014. What’s ahead? Here are six predictions.

If Mary and Joseph tried to reach Bethlehem today, they would get stuck at an Israeli checkpointPalestinian Christians complicate the simplistic narrative of “Muslims v Jews”; they are an inconvenient reminder that the conflict in the Holy Land has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with freedom and self-determination. Whatever your view of Jesus or Muhammad, if you are a Palestinian resident of the West Bank you are a victim of the longest military occupation in the world.

Gamasutra – The History of CivilizationGamasutra is proud to be partnering with the IGDA's Preservation SIG to present detailed official histories of each of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Canon. The Canon "provides a starting-point for the difficult task of preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S. National Film Registry has played for film culture and history", and Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Henry Lowood, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector revealed the inaugural honorees at GDC 2007. This latest piece follows the carrer of industry icon Sid Meier as he established himself as one of the most important contributors to PC gaming with the iconic turn based strategy epic Civilization

Netanyahu finally speaks his mind | The Times of IsraelAt his Friday press conference, the prime minister ruled out full Palestinian sovereignty, derided the US approach to Israeli security, and set out his Middle East overview with unprecedented candor. His remarks were not widely reported; they should be

Twitter User Stats Crackdown – Business InsiderTwitter has taken the unusual step of shutting off its datapipe to certain companies that have published their own stats on how big Twitter's user base really is, according to two sources. The move comes after Twitter's stock was hammered in the early part of the year when investors discovered growth in monthly active users (MAUs) was slowing or stagnant, and that measures of engagement per user were on the decline.

The Olympic CityThe Olympic City is an ongoing documentary photography project by Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit that looks at the legacy of the Olympic Games in former host cities around the world. Hosting the Olympics has become a way for a city to show itself off on an international stage and generate toursim dollars, and cities spend millions or billions for the privilege. But after the events are over, the medals have been handed out, and the torch is extinguished, what’s next? What happens to a city after the Olympics are gone?

Das Referenz: Wikipedia Redesigned for iPad — MediumWikipedia is ripe for a thorough redesign because it’s not 2004 anymore. We designed and built Das Referenz: an iPad app that changes Wikipedia according to our taste in typography, visual style, and interaction design.

Core War Tournament – Spring 2014 – Computing HistoryTo celebrate the 30th anniversary in May, The Spring Core War Tournament will be held at The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge UK on Saturday 31st May 2014. The Centre was established to tell the story of the Information Age and presents an interactive collection of computers and artifacts. On the day of the tournament we will be setting a number of Core War challenges for visitors.

How to control a topic | WikipediocracyAs you edit WP you will become more experienced in dealing with the passive-aggressive machinations and sneaky tactics employed by your adversaries. Remember, you have beaten them at their own game. Enjoy the fruits of your labors as you use Wikipedia to promote your cause. Happy editing!

I’m back. This time without Google | Ahmed Atia Web SpaceIt's been such a long time since my last post. I'm back. But this time, I'm back without Google. I dropped Google Analytics, Google CDN, and Google Web Fonts. This is for ATIA Web Space. But moreover, I dropped Google Search as the-go-to search engine.

The death of the homepage in one simple graphSo it’s an odd thing when you’ve been saying something for years and nobody believes you, then suddenly, someone publishes one leaked graph, and overnight all the world agrees with you: The homepage is dead. And still they’ve got it wrong.

Gamasutra – The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-LifeWhile Half-Life has seen resounding critical and financial success (winning over 50 Game of the Year awards and selling more than a million copies worldwide), few people realize that it didn’t start out a winner — in fact, Valve’s first attempt at the game had to be scrapped. It was mediocre at best, and suffered from the typical problems that plague far too many games. This article is about the teamwork – or "Cabal process" — that turned our initial, less than impressive version of Half-Life into a groundbreaking success.

The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British PoundIn 1992, George Soros brought the Bank of England to its knees. In the process, he pocketed over a billion dollars. Making a billion dollars is by all accounts pretty cool. But demolishing the monetary system of Great Britain in a single day with an elegantly constructed bet against its currency? That’s the stuff of legends.

Metaprogramming for madmen | The ryg blogAlas, we spent an afternoon looking at different such packages, and none of them actually understood even that much about C/C++ code; they were mostly trying to make do with regular expressions. That wasn’t gonna fly for what we needed. At the end of the day (the Sunday before Easter Sunday, 2004), we hadn’t found anything useful – we had a plan, but no way to make it work. That’s when Chaos decided that, “well, guess I’ll need to write my own C++ parser then”. What, you think I was kidding with the title of this post? Note we had about 3 days total to make this work, and we were going all in by doing this; if this hadn’t worked out, we’d have been screwed.

Cuttings from a Medieval Italian Choirbook | The Public Domain ReviewJames Freeman, intern in Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Section at The British Library, looks at cuttings from a huge 14th-century Italian choirbook and how digital technology is now helping scholars build a picture of the once intact original through virtually reuniting the “diaspora” of fragments.

Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit | The Credits.Instead, pitted against the military-industrial complex, Playtex created the 21-layer spacesuit, each layer distinct yet interrelated in function to the rest of the whole—a masterly combination of elegance, complexity, and form. Where the military contractors created cybernetic, armor-like suits (that failed, and failed again), Playtex’s vision was one of crucial softness, world class stitching, and perfect design. Traditional engineering firms could not figure out how to meet all the mission requirements and create a functioning suit that would keep the Apollo astronauts alive. The seamstresses at Playtex, with their years of experience fashioning girdles and bras, could, and did.

WarmPlace.Ru. Virtual ANS Spectral SynthesizerVirtual ANS is a software simulator of the unique Russian synthesizer ANS – photoelectronic microtonal/spectral musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1938 to 1958. Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin.

Facebook buys smartphone fitness-tracking app MovesFacebook may already be tracking your usage to serve you ads, but how would you feel if it was able to log your movement? That's exactly what could be on the cards after the company confirmed it's bought Moves, the fitness-tracking app that records your daily activities using your smartphone.

10 reasons to switch to ggplot | Mandy MejiaThere are a lot of R users out there who are resistant to switching from base graphics to ggplot, and while there are some legitimate downsides and probably settings where it doesn’t make sense, for most users I believe it’s well worth the time and effort required to get started with ggplot. I mean, the New York Times thinks so! So for all those doubters (or newbies) out there, here goes my best shot at convincing you that switching to ggplot is worth the effort.

Stock photos that don’t suck — Design / UX — MediumFinding great stock photos is a pain. You’re left with either low-res amateur photos, people wearing cheesy headsets, or photos that are out of budget for the project you’re working on. Below is an ongoing list (so bookmark it) of the best stock photo sites I’ve come across.

Short Ribs Time and Temp – Recipe – ChefStepsCreative possibilities are especially compelling aspects of sous vide cooking. The ability to cook ingredients for prolonged periods of time at carefully controlled temperatures can yield appealing textures that are impractical, or even impossible, to achieve using conventional cooking techniques. Throughout this course we'll explore these possibilities; below is a showcase of the range of textures that you can easily achieve by sous vide cooking a tough, but flavorful cut of meat like beef short rib.

Introduction to Huginn on VimeoHuginn is a open source system for building agents that observe the world and act on your behalf. This is an introductory screencast. Your agents are standing by!

Photographing A Town That Never Was – The Meta PictureArtist and photographer Michael Paul Smith has spent hours upon hours photographing one special town that he holds very dear to his heart. There is something that always drew him to it, and the images he created are simple, but stunning. They glow with small-town charm and innocence, reminiscent of days and decades past.

Taking A Second Look At Free Fonts | Smashing MagazineOnce thought of as amateurish by professional designers, free and open-source fonts have gone through something of a renaissance in just the last few years. The quality of available free fonts has increased dramatically. To be frank, free fonts don’t have a good reputation, and often they are knock-offs of thoroughly crafted, already established typefaces. So is it time for professional designers to take a second look?

Proper Russian: Why Russians Are Not SmilingWhen you see people smiling at you in the USA or Germany, it doesn't mean anything other than an overall neutral attitude toward you. A smile is a “level zero” in communication. By contrast, in Russia, no smile is a sign of a neutral politeness, and a smile is always informative. A Russian smile is always personal. When a Russian smiles to you, he or she wants to say that he or she likes you sincerely.